The Showdown That Wasn’t: U.S.-Israeli Relations and American Domestic Politics, 1973–75

An enduring debate among scholars of security studies centers on the question of the extent to which domestic political considerations influence U.S. foreign policy. How influential are such factors in shaping the United States’ approach to international affairs? Do ethnic lobbies and public opinion play a substantial role in influencing the choices made by American leaders? In particular, does the domestic context in the United States affect significantly the manner in which U.S. strategists deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict? Or does the concern for advancing Washington’s interests in the Middle East dominate political pressures at home?¹

Major disagreements exist among experts on these crucially important and policy-relevant questions, as demonstrated by the reaction to the work of political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt on the issue. In 2006 Mearsheimer and Walt wrote that since the June 1967 Six-Day War, “[T]he centerpiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been [the United States’] relationship with Israel.” More controversially, they claimed that the U.S.-Israeli special relationship is not based “on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives.” Rather, it “derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby.’” It is, in their view, “the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby” that explains the depth and consistency of American support for Israel during the past half century.² In short, Mearsheimer and Walt, who later expanded their thesis into a book, argue that were it not for the influence of this interest group, which they define as “a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively works to move U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction,” American statecraft in the Middle East, particularly toward Israel, would look very different.³

Mearsheimer and Walt’s writings on the subject set off a public, and at times intense, debate. According to Michael Massing, “Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force.”⁴ Some scholars and commentators, such as Jerome Slater, referred to the Mearsheimer-Walt book as “one of the most important foreign policy works of our times.”⁵ On the other hand, Daniel Drezner wrote in a blog post that “[Mearsheimer and Walt] should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.”⁶ Observers such as Massing argued that their “thin documentation” and distortion of evidence “gives [their work] a secondhand feel,” and weakens the robustness of its empirical foundation.⁷ Walter Russell Mead suggested that Mearsheimer and Walt had failed to explain clearly how they defined “the lobby,” writing, “When it comes down to it, Mearsheimer and Walt do not seem to know who, exactly, belongs to this amoebic, engulfing blob they call the lobby and who does not.”⁸ And many charged that, in arguably the book’s most controversial section, Mearsheimer and Walt failed to provide compelling evidence for their claim that the Israel lobby was the driving force behind President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.⁹ Mearsheimer and Walt at times added further fuel to the fire by using strong language of their own, as when they responded to a review of their book by Robert Lieberman by writing: “Lieberman’s critique is more of a dust-kicking operation than a serious assessment of our work.”¹⁰

Given the tremendous importance of the issue and the fierce debate initiated by Mearsheimer and Walt, one would expect that scholars would be eager to marshal all available evidence to buttress their claims about the influence of domestic politics on U.S. Middle East policy. Curiously, however, researchers on both sides have ignored primary source records in their efforts to determine the extent to which interest groups, or politics at home more generally, shape the U.S. stance on Arab-Israeli diplomacy. Most analysts seem to assume that this sort of historical data would not reveal much because, as Melvin Small argues, decisionmakers are able to convince themselves that their choices...